‘Once he was well out of sight she snapped her fingers and sent the beast after him, and I swear I’ve never seen anything move as quickly. The fucking monster was away like a racehorse, and it was only a moment later that we heard the man scream as it overtook him in the darkness beneath the trees and brought him down. I thought that was it, but then he let out a horrible, piteous howl, and then another, and another, each one more frantic than the one before. One of the guards took great pleasure in explaining it to us later, laughing at us in his broken Latin as he explained that the animal kills its victims in a leisurely manner, knocking them to the ground and then rearing back from them for a moment before sinking its teeth into their thighs, or groin, or guts. He told us the woman’s name for the bastard thing, something unpronounceable, but then he was kind enough to translate it to one of the few Latin words he knew, a word I’m pretty sure he’d heard from other prisoners. He called it “Monstrum”, and from then on I could only ever think of it as the monster.’
He paused.
‘We crouched, shivering with terror and thanking our gods that it wasn’t us out there in the dark while that fucking dog killed him one piece at a time, each scream he gave out more soul rending than the last. When at last he fell silent I muttered a prayer to Mithras for his soul, but more than that, I prayed for my own end at their hands to take any form other than that nightmarish death. After that we expected the monster to return, but its mistress turned away without a second glance, and the guards just kept laughing and making chewing faces at us.’
Marcus frowned as the meaning of the soldier’s words sank in.
‘It was … eating him?’
Verus shrugged, his face as devoid of emotion as that of the female warrior he had described a moment before.
‘Yes, Centurion. As I’d already realised from the look the woman gave us as she waited to release the beast, our comrade’s death was a simple and terrifying way to completely subdue us. When the dog was done with his body the remains were left where they lay for the carrion animals to complete the job that the animal had begun.’
He stared levelly at the two Sarmatae.
‘And still you fail to believe my words, I can see it in your eyes. If either of you has half the intelligence with which you came into this world you’ll offer up a prayer now that if you should die on that hill tonight then your end will be with an arrow in your chest or a sword blade in your throat, and not with a dog the size of a donkey ripping out your guts while you wail for help that is never going to come.’
Marcus nodded slowly.
‘And they used the dog to hunt you, once you had escaped from The Fang?’
‘They hunted me for eight days and for all that time the beast was never far away, baying for my blood. Every time I heard that sound I wanted nothing more than for the hunt to be over …’
‘You considered giving yourself up, if only to put an end to the torture of constant pursuit, right?’
The soldier looked across at Tarion, a calculating look on his face.
‘It wasn’t the dog that stopped me from surrendering myself. By the time I’d been in their hands for twenty days I’d have settled for death by his teeth in a heartbeat, given that the Venicones were intent on killing me one tiny piece at a time with sharp blades and hot iron, and worse, intent on hollowing me out until there was nothing left of me but a shambling shell of a man.’ He looked across at Marcus as if weighing the Roman’s capacity for survival under the same torment. ‘There were seven of us taken prisoner, so with the man that The Bitch set her dog on that left six. A couple of the lads were big men in every respect, right hard cases who had gone down fighting under the sheer weight of numbers thrown against them, and from the first chance they got they struggled against our captors, fighting the ropes that bound them and spitting in their faces if they got the chance.’ He laughed without any hint of humour, looking up at the branches above them. ‘The Venicones broke them in days, of course, degrading them brutally in front of the rest of us in order to show us all what was to come, until both of them were incapable of any resistance, and were begging for release from their torture and humiliation. That taught me the most important lesson in my survival, that fighting back against such inhumanity would only serve to incite our captors to greater ferocity. I learned never to show any signs of resistance or hatred, but to keep that fury bottled up tightly in here …’
He tapped his chest.
‘After twenty days there were only three of us left alive, and another ten sunrises saw the other two dead in just the same way that each man had died before them, once his spirit was broken so completely that he would go to his death as a willing sacrifice to their gods. The king’s priest had them tied down on his high altar and then ritually murdered them with a long knife he wore at all times, tearing open their chests and pulling out their beating hearts while those left alive were forced to watch, our eyes held open to prevent any attempt to avoid the sight.’
The Roman frowned in incomprehension.
‘You prayed for a swift death, and yet they kept you alive for another month?’
Verus nodded.
‘I can only assume that they knew that they had failed to break my will, and that total submission was the price of what they saw as a merciful death. They could see it in my eyes, I expect, my rage and horror at the bestial tortures to which they submitted me, and my constant promises to myself that the day would come when I was the man with the blade in his hands, and those torturing bastards the ones doing the screaming. I told myself that I would die like a man attempting to escape rather than submit to an animal’s death on that slab with my spirit finally broken.’
Tarion, who had listened to the soldier’s story with a look of fascination, nodded slowly.
‘And so you found yourself hiding in the swamp, torn between the urge to strike out at your pursuers and simply to slip away into the darkness, and for ever escape their attentions.’ He met Verus’s questioning look with a knowing smile. ‘How do I know this? It’s simple enough. I have been in the same position more than once. When a man thieves for his livelihood he must sometimes take risks that no sane man would consider acceptable, if he is to eat. I have hidden in a tiny space with my guts growling for days at a time, waiting for the hunt to die down so that I could slip away into the night.’
The soldier grimaced.
‘I would not have thought to compare our places in this life with anything other than contempt for the path you chose, at least before those bastards up there taught me that a man cannot always choose his path. So how did you end up as a thief?’
Tarion shrugged.
‘How does anyone come to a way of life that they would not have chosen for themselves, had the choice ever been there to make? Ill chance, the wrong people …’ He paused for a moment, smiling lopsidedly at the men around him. ‘Verus is right, it’s easy to despise a man like me, isn’t it? A man who has chosen to live by stealing the work of others, judged to be the lowest form of life in a civilised society. Except, my friends, we do not live in a civilised society, no matter what we tell ourselves about the nobility of the empire. My father died of the plague, brought to our town by soldiers who had travelled in the east, and my mother was left without any means of supporting herself since she refused to whore out her body. And so I found myself a thief, untrained and initially unskilled, but believe me when I tell you that I was a fast learner. The first apple I lifted from a market stall almost saw me caught and doubtless sold into slavery, and I was saved only by the fact that I was light on my feet, but thieves tend to band together and so before long I was part of a gang that made a living by robbing anyone of anything as the opportunity presented itself. My speciality, as it turned out, was the theft of men’s personal possessions in the street, especially the contents of their purses.’